Speculation abounds that Facebook is working on a phone and it seems more than logical to assume it will be based on Android and sold via carriers. In fact one would imagine AT&T is trying like crazy to get an exclusive deal with the company as they desperately need a new hot product when the iPhone potentially becomes available on other networks.

In fact, it would be surprising if carriers haven't been chasing Facebook down to get such a phone with mass appeal out of the gate.

As the first week of the fall begins, there is a wealth of news to share such as China getting the iPad, Facebook status updates leading to burglaries, another high- level departure at Nokia and GoDaddy.com looking to sell itself for a billion dollars.

The pace of acquisitions hasn't slowed as of late - HP just announced it will acquire ArcSight to bolster its security offering and PAETEC will pick up Cavalier Telephone.

Perhaps the biggest news of all is Wal-Mart's entry into the MVNO space - they will be reselling T-Mobile's service.

If there is a common theme here - it's that technology continues to be full of opportunity as it becomes more common.

One of the more exciting events taking place at ITEXPO earlier this year was StartUp Camp as it was a single place you could visit to learn about the absolute coolest vendors trying to break into the communications space. In a few weeks StartUp Camp2 Comm Edition comes to Los Angeles October 4th and is collocated with ITEXPO once again.

There are many people in tech who are not only passionate but have very funny but quirky senses of humor. One is Jamie Siminoff of SimulScribe/PhoneTag. The other is Jeff Bonforte (pictured) CEO of e-mail productivity boosting XOBNI.

Jamie keynoted (see video below) last year's conference and Jeff will keynote this one. Expect Jeff to also be funny and inspirational.

For some reason when I hear Sergey Brin wants Google to be the third half of my brain I feel a bit freaked out. Partially because they already know what everyone wants, desires - how often we search for our Exes, how often we check porn, etc. Then again, the next step seems to be logically implanting themselves in our heads so why am I surprised?

I just hope the third brain they put in me is out of Beta.

Then again, I could use some help from the Google guys when keeping track of all the excitement and new events surrounding ITEXPO.

A while back I left a GPS unit in a rental car and when I returned it. I don't want to be offensive to any particular company so I will refer to the GPS company supplying my device as PomPom. When I realized I wasn't going to get it back I called the company because I remembered it was M2M-enabled and as such I paid a $10/month fee for Google search access and other online goodies.

The first thing I did was cancel my account but the second was ask that it not be enabled again if someone who takes the unit calls PomPom to start the service.

It has been an extremely exciting week again for tech news and moreover for me personally as I got a chance to open up my Sony Dash and it is a very cool addition to my desktop as it allows me to view my photos and take advantage of widgets of all kinds which among other thinks allow me to see the pandas at the San Diego Zoo. This handy gadget has a slew of communications, social networking and calendar features as well but for now, I just want to see the pandas.

The big news from yesterday of course was Steve Jobs onstage pushing a slew of new iPods and a rental-only model for Apple TV and a social network integrated into iTunes.

Having recently purchased a Sony Dash which I still need to take out of the box, I am obviously intrigued by the idea of devices which allow widgets to run on them. Apparently Alcatel-Lucent too is enamored with the concept of widgets and mobile apps as the company just picked up OpenPlug, a company focused on cross-platform application development solutions. This purchase follows on the acquisition of ProgrammableWeb a major resource to the development community involved in mashups and web-based APIs.